The election is over, but the repercussions of many relationships may be just beginning as spouses all over the contemplate uncomfortable holidays as they have been tested across the political divide.
Unfortunately, it has been one huge freakin’ polarizing event. When I met Yael she was living her life as an Orthodox Jew, who kept kosher woman and I a pluralist Black lesbian in 12-step recovery. You might think, “Yep, they are opposites.” We wanted a kind of relationship that neither of us had ever seen or been in before. So what was needed was for us to understand each others’ different perspectives. Understand where each of us was coming from and have these conversations in a way that could reduce our biases and prejudices of each other.
Personal, Political, and Religious/Spiritual Healing of Opposites
For over a decade Yael and I have been creating what we call a “Divine Relationship.” We’ve committed to walk together on a path that heals both our hearts, and opens both of us to the experience of the Divine Choreographer. As we’ve been walking this journey together, it has activated layers of pain and unmet developmental needs and wounds stemming from our early childhood experiences and the socialization process.
Our commitment to healing these wounds and meeting these needs in our relationship is a central focus of our relationship and my professional work with couples. The process has served as a cohesive force that helped us through many challenging and difficult situations. We were able to navigate our way through these challenges by using the forces of compassion, understanding, empathy and unconditional love–for each other and ourselves.
The process of resolving and dissolving relationship conflicts opened us to higher consciousness and deeper intimacy with each other and with self. What we learned is that the deeper we go in our healing work, the more we were able to expand our consciousness of self and “other.” Our experiences help us identify what it means to live in Conscious Connection with each other and all “others.”
The popular book about the Law of Attraction says that we can use consciousness to draw to us what we want. What that approach misses is that what we try to attract with our conscious mind is often overshadowed by the hidden agenda in our unconscious mind. In IMAGO relationships we say that the unconscious has an agenda of its own—restoring us to our original wholeness.
Once we understand what we missed during our earlier development, we must then reconcile these functions and dissolve the beliefs, decisions and defensive adaptations that we developed at that time in order to self protect; as well as get rid ourselves of the harmful things we did to cope and/or self-soothe in that harsh environment. Then, examine the impact of our family-of- origin experiences and how that contributes to our current ways of being in relationship. I would be remiss if I didn’t emphasize to my clients the importance of connecting the dots between the past and how it can be a “silent voter” in current relational struggles. What do I mean by a “silent voter?” My teacher Hedy Schleifer coined that term and the silent voter is when we unconsciously act out or do something that appears out of character for us and afterwards say, “Why the hell did I do that.” We typically have no excuse and there appears to be no rhyme or reason for why we did what we did. That’s what is mean by “silent voter.” I also think of the “silent voter” as the “unconscious climate of our childhoods” playing out during those events. I often tell clients, that we can never be sure that we will not repeat hurtful behaviors until we understand the unconscious fuel driving those behaviors.
So, I believe the key to living in Connection and Harmony with our partner is syncing or integrating our conscious mind with our unconscious mind. When these two minds are out of sync, the unconscious mind takes over. The silent voters can also be seen as the 5, 7 and 12 year-old (within us) running the show. For many of us some of our deepest pain and wounding occurred around those ages and thus development needs went unmet and tasks were not achieved. However in order to cope (stay alive really), we developed some very ingenious ways of surviving and preventing us from the pain. Then we grew up and became adults and we carried these same defenses we used at 5, 7 and 12 years. But we are now using the defenses as adults. Some of these defenses have become so hardened in our character and personalities we often think of them as our true identity (i.e., I’m just a perfectionist, I’m depressed or I’m just codependent). What we think of as a personality trait is often our character adaptation, developed in childhood and it become morphed into who we are. With those defenses tightly in place, rather than experiencing true connection and harmony in our relationships, we are controlled by trauma, old coping mechanism along with the unconscious agenda (restoration of wholeness), it ultimately can prevent us from experiencing and developing our true essence and connecting with those who closest to us.
I have discovered personally and professionally, that it’s crucial to take seriously the unconscious agenda and the role it plays in our relationships. Our unconscious mind holds our wants, impulses, feelings, protective reactions, intuition, needs, desires and beliefs about self, others, values, imagination and thoughts about the world. It operates as a kind of “lens” through which we look and organize our life experiences.
Healing Relational Wounds
Based on my own experiences, I believe that the best place to heal your wounds is in a marriage or committed intimate relationship. Most of our wounding happened in the intimate relationships with our parents, siblings or other adults when we were young. So committed adult relationships are a great place to heal these wounds. In order for the healing to truly happen the process needs safety and stability.
I’ve also discovered that modifying our relational template and the early childhood wounding in it requires being aware of two things. First, understanding what you needed as a child and didn’t get for whatever reason. The journey here is not about blaming our caretakers, because they could have been absent, distracted or unavailable for a variety of important reasons. The journey is about discovering what you needed so that you can clearly ask for it. The second is learning what you got that you didn’t need. Very few of know what an optimal parenting looks like so we often blame or shame ourselves for having problems. Or we make excuse for harmful childhood experiences such as neglect, abuse or abandonment. Once we understand what we missed or lost in those early years, we can reconcile and integrate the past in the present and begin to re-author our relationships. Healing takes place in the present. We are not the author of our relationships until we understand the behaviors and unmet needs, desires and longings in the past driving us. It is important for couples to understand that talking about the past doesn’t heal it. Healing the past happens in the present.
